


...and that has made all the difference

by maharetr



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:29:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maharetr/pseuds/maharetr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick steps through the door, and he’s pretty sure he’s made a mistake; ... then he looks down at Cassie, and he’s sure he’s made a mistake: she’s looking around with glee, bug-eyed and like she’s died and gone to color heaven.</p>
            </blockquote>





	...and that has made all the difference

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jamjar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamjar/gifts).



They limp their way back to Nick’s apartment. Well, Nick limps and Cassie’s polite enough to match his pace. He hesitates as they step out of the elevator, but the Wiper is there as asked, leaning beside Nick’s door.

“Done,” Wo Chiang says softly in Cantonese. “She will sleep for hours, just don’t scream in her ear.”

“Thank you,” Nick says, fervently.

He pats his pocket. “I took my compensation from the bag on the floor, yes?”

It’s not actually a question, but Nick nods vigorously. “Yes, thank you.”

He has no idea how much was in there – if a glimmer of Cassie’s six million actually made it from the world of infinitely changing visions into past-tense fixed reality, but whatever Wo Chiang wants is worth it.

The stitch is slumped in the chair, but she’s snoring softly. Still…”Stay outside,” Nick breathes to Cassie. “Don’t touch anything, they might come back with sniffers.”

He creeps past the stitch into his bedroom, and pauses for just a moment to look around. He’s going to miss this bedroom. Not the wallpaper, that’s for sure, but the late afternoon sunlight through the windows had been pretty, and that was one of the better beds he’s slept in. He’s going to miss this _apartment_ which is dumb. But two years is the longest he’s stayed in a place, ever. He figures he’s allowed to have a pang of nostalgia or two.

Nick grabs his new toothbrush and rifles through his drawers, looking for the neatest, sharpest clothes he owns. There’s not much, but they can probably change that, if the bag on the floor is any sign.

Out in the living room, the stitch is still tied to the chair. He could -- _should_ \-- probably untie her, but the memory of agonised writhing is far too fresh. Nick adds his toothbrush to the bag and drapes his clothes over the wads of cash. It won’t do anything about the smell – that much money has an _odour_ it turns out – but a casual glance might fool someone. He zips it up and starts a casual heft up onto his shoulder – and ends up jerked short; he can’t even get it off the ground.

Cassie’s standing just outside the doorway, not even leaning on anything, and Nick has a moment to be surprised that she did exactly as he asked before she starts laughing at him. It’s a faintly brittle sound; she sounds somewhere between smug and freaked out, with an emphasis on the latter.

“I guess this was a way of everyone getting what they wanted, huh?”

“I guess so,” he grins back at her. “If you wanted your weight in cash, anyway.” 

He loosens his grip, thinks _up_ , and the bag rises. Enough to look like it’s carrying overnight clothes and a toothbrush, and not much more. Better.

“C’mon.” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”

~*~

They start walking, aimlessly. This is familiar, if a little rusty, the walking with no purpose, the split-second decisions. They pass a bus stop, and Nick decides not to take it only as they coming abreast.

Further up the street there’s a cab driver slouching behind his wheel, and Nick thrusts a hundred at him.

“Take us on a scenic route downtown.” The guy blinks, but barely looks at them twice, and it’s okay. In the back of the cab Nick starts, cautiously, to plan. It’s been a whole two years, maybe, since he had to think like this, but enough is coming back, the reflexes are settling back in.

He texts Hook and Emily from Cassie’s phone: _Success!. Reserve us rooms and a table in a swanky hotel, Diceman._ ”

The taxi is slowing now, merging into the city traffic. When they’re less than a mile from Hook’s selected hotel he directs the driver to the curb. “Just round it up,” he says airily to the driver, and the driver grins, and counts them out valuable, valuable tens and twenties. Nick _lifts_ the bag and gets out of the taxi as smoothly as he can.

Cassie’s smart enough to only raise objections when they’re clear of the cab.

“What are we doing?”

“We need things, c’mon.” Walking smoothly on the bad leg _sucks_ , but he’s pretty sure he’s not limping as they head into the Crowne Plaza. He presses Cassie’s phone to his ear, starts talking in short, impatient sentences.

“That’s not going to work.” He tries to make the pauses natural. “No… no…” he reaches the desk, drops the bag, mimes writing impatiently in the concierge’s direction. Jackpot, and entire pad. “Okay,” he says into the phone, nods to the woman. “How _many_ details do we need to change?” He writes meaninglessly on the pad, grabs it off the counter, nods to the concierge and is walking away before the she can object.

“Insurance,” he says, handing back Cassie’s phone, dropping the pad into the bag to keep it out of sight.

They meet up in the lobby of Hook’s randomly selected hotel. Cassie is looking more than a little hesitant.

“Do you see anything bad?” Nick asks out of the corner of his mouth. She shakes her head, wordlessly, and _oh_ , Nick gets at least a little of her wide-eye-ness.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Walk like you own the place. We _do_ own this place, we could buy the penthouse suite for a _month_ , seriously.” She doesn’t look convinced, but she straightens her shoulders anyway. “Attagirl,” Nick grins.

A hotel as swanky as this one is an excellent place to break a few hundred dollar bills. Hook and Emily have staked out a table, not so far in the corner that it looks weird, but secluded enough that they can talk.

“Jesus,” Hook says. “You look like shit.”

Nick bares his teeth in a grin. “Worth it though.” He tries to catch Cassie’s eye. “Doing pretty amazingly for a couple of dead people, right?” Cassie won’t meet his eyes. She’s scribbling in her notebook, but it doesn’t look like anything directed. He’s reminded suddenly of scribbling on the Crowne Plaza’s stationary.

“Sirs, Ma’ams,” the waiter greets. He even manages to maintain his smile while he’s looking at Cassie’s hair. This guy deserves a tip. Nick takes a menu, tries to stop his heart tripping at the prices. Even the unhelftable bag at his feet isn’t enough to break a lifetime of scraping by.

The idea of food seems to perk Cassie up at bit, at least.

“Here,” Nick murmurs, tears off a page of the notepad and passes it to her, logo side down. That's a lifetime’s habit, too: not showing your hand until it works for you. Even if Division _does_ think they’re dead. “Write down the six things you really want to eat, number them.”

She stares at him like he’s crazy, “Practice,” he says. “How you try and stay one step ahead of the watchers, when you’re not a watcher.”

“Oh,” she says. She looks down at the blank page. “I just… see stuff, and try not to be there when it happens.”

Nick wonders, fleetingly, how many different ways she saw herself die before it solidified into tigers. How many close calls she’d had.

“Which is useful,” Nick concedes. “But we want to plan a little longer forward than that. And this is how we do it.”

She glances at them all, looking nowhere near 14, possibly younger than 13, and starts to write.

“Okay,” he fishes the die out of his pocket, displays it on his palm for her to see. “And then you shake --.”

“Ah-ah!” Hook grabs his hand. “Rule something-or-other of survival: never play dice with a mover, jeeze.”

“He sucks at it,” Cassie points out, and that’s a lot more like the Cassie he knows.

‘See? I suck at it,” Nick shoots back. “And you can shift the numbers. You’re no more trustworthy here than I am.”

“I shouldn’t throw,” Cassie says. “I made the list.” They pause to look at her. “That’s what this is about, right? Delaying choices, keeping them as random as possible?”

They all look at Emily. She holds up her hands. “No way am I touching that die,” she says. “I don’t want to know where it’s been.”

Nick laughs. Pinky rolls his eyes at the lot of them, but he throws, diligently, five times.

Tomorrow, they can start the hassle of getting better, _real_ fake IDs. But for tonight, the hotel is willing to take their cash deposit. Tonight they have a magnificent meal and they get to eat, drink and be merry, damnit.

“Lotto win, Sir?” The waiter asks, smiling, as he clears their plates.

“We beat the odds, that’s for sure,” Nick says. Cassie smiles, but it’s a pale imitation of ones she’s flashed Nick previously. She’d accepted her coke without a word of complaint, too, and that’s downright weird.

“Would you like to see the desert menu?”

Nick raises his eyebrow in query. Cassie shrugs, and that’s enough to make Nick _worried_.

“No, thanks,” Nick says, and leaves a random bill on the table. They troop up to Hook’s room, hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door.

Nick gets the pleasure of up ending the bag across the bed, bundles and bundles of cash spilling out.

“ _Wow,_ ” Pinky whispers, his eyes huge.

“How I figure it,” Nick says. “Is we all nearly got ourselves killed for that case, we all get an equal share. The wiper took his cut, now we divvy up ours. What you want to do after… hang out together, fly to Timbuktu, stay in Hong Kong, that’s up to each of us.”

Cassie flinches. It’s a minute movement, and Nick only catches it because she’s solidly in his peripherals vision. He doesn’t know what that means, but now isn’t exactly the opportune moment to ask.

“Take tonight,” he continues. “Or however long you want, to think about it. We’ve got this hotel for the next night or so, until we can work out something more long term.”

Hook nods, and gives Nick a thumbs up _I’m with you_ , like there was even a question of what Hook would do. “Thanks, bro,” Nick grins. The others count bundles while Nick and Hook flip a coin: the syringe gets locked in Hook’s room safe.

The five piles are steadily growing. Cassie looks down at hers and bites her lip.

“Hey,” Nick says softly. “Six hundred thousand is still a helluva a lot. You were only three zeros off?”

She gives a tiny wince of a smile, and starts shoving her share into a Hook-provided paper bags.

They walk back to their room in silence. Cassie is hunched in on herself, looking small and thin and impossibly young.

She goes straight for the far bed, flopping onto it and digging out her sketchbook. She’s not drawing, she’s just shading jagged triangles of bright color.

Nick sits cautiously on the other bed.

“What’s up?” He asks, before the silence can stretch to unbearable.

She stops scrawling long enough to hitch one shoulder in a shrug. “I’m fine.” She says, but she sure as hell doesn’t sound it – her voice sounds clogged, and when she glances up she looks _stricken_.

“Oh, hey,” Nick says, almost involuntarily. “You’re okay, it’s okay.” He reaches for her, just as instinctively. “C’mere,” he murmurs, and she scrambles at him, stumbling between the beds, wriggling like she wants to burrow into his shoulder. She’s fighting back tears, hard, like she had been that afternoon, but this time the tears are winning.

“I thought—” she chokes. “I thought I was going to die.” 

He squeezes her shoulder, awkwardly. “Hey, I told you, you’re a crappy artist and you’re wrong, right?” He’s hoping for a chuckle, but she shakes her head and doesn’t look up.

“I mean, I _always_ thought I was going to die, like that, and –“ she runs out of breath, and chokes on the next sob. He rocks her, stroking her hair. “And I should be _happy_ , and I _am_. I just… I get to be fourteen and I – I don’t know what to _do_ with that.”

“Ah,” Nick says. He rests his chin on her head, tries to wrap her up. “Yeah. I can see how that’d be weird.”

She cries herself out against his shoulder, until she’s sniffling, but her breathing is evening out. She doesn’t make any move to sit up, and Nick doesn’t stop rubbing her back.

“What’d you do when you were fourteen?” she asks, muffled against his shirt.

Fourteen (and thirteen, and fifteen) had been a haze of low-level terror: fear of himself, his powers, of Division, of the older boys in the group home, of his next foster placement…

“I think you can make your fourteen whatever you want,” he says. “And I can make my twenty-two whatever I want. Two hundred thousand dollars between us can buy us a _lot_ of whatever.”

That does get him a chuckle, a feeble one, but it’s something.

“When is your birthday?” he asks.

“August 12,” she sniffs.

“There you go. We’ve got whole months to figure out an amazing, amazing whatever, even before it starts.”

And right there, that’s a decision, and they both know it. Not one that a watcher would ever be able to track, but one of those life-altering moments that didn’t involve anything except sitting on a bed talking.

“I think there should be cake, to start with. I’m partial to chocolate myself.”

She wipes her nose on her sleeve, and relaxes against him a little. “I like chocolate,” she says, and it sounds like a real smile in her voice.

Nick smiles back. “Then we have a plan. Chocolate cake, August 12.”

~*~

Pinky had been gone the next morning. Emily offers her address for future form filling and hugs Nick goodbye with surprisingly ferocity. 

Cassie can think ahead, literally, but that doesn’t mean she’s much good at planning. She follows along silently as Hook and Nick stress about how someone copes with three hundred thousand dollars in cash. 

They sort fake names and stride out with Hook and three business cards to the nearest bank. The bank is very accommodating when they present their “identification cards” and the amounts of cash to be deposited. Their credit cards arrive at Emily’s place some days later, and Nick breathes a little sigh of relief.

Getting actual fake identity cards is more complicated. Hook can find them people willing to do US-based _birth certificates_ before he can find someone willing to do them solid Hong Kong ID cards. Hook and Nick give up on the idea of hanging around in Hong Kong pretty quickly, and concentrate on the ‘getting them out of the area’ papers. Their birth certificates arrive some days later, and Hook silently passes Cassie an extra sheet. It takes Nick a moment to figure it out, until he realises Hook got one for Cassie’s mom, too.

Then it’s just a matter of waiting for passports. “I can’t fake the biometrics shit,” Hook says. “I’m a shifter, not an microchip wizard. I don’t do computers.”

So they wait, and keep their heads down at the hotel. Nick keeps pads of Crowne Plaza hotel stationary scattered around their Grand Hyatt room in case a watcher locks onto them. Cassie gradually moves on from drawing bright triangles to mundane meals and random sightseeing. She’s smiling more often, but Nick can see the waiting, and more importantly the not knowing, weighing on her. 

One night, he’s carrying their takeout – because being able to afford fancy dining doesn’t stop the craving for greasy barbequed duck – back to the hotel when he sees the Hair. _It looks like a clown vomited_ his conscious mind offers up, but his legs are already zigzagging him through the crowd to catch up. Huh. Talk about a decision a watcher couldn’t track. He hopes.

“Hey!” he calls. Several people turn, warily, but so does Hair woman, so that’s okay. “Hi, I, um,” he spreads his free hand in what he hopes is a non-threatening gesture, and amps up the sincerity.  
“I love your hair,” he says in Cantonese. “My sister would _die_ to have her hair like that. Where did you get it done?” The woman touches her ponytail uncertainly, but smiles back genuinely enough. Nick offers her his phone to type in the details, and she does. “Thank you, thank you.”

His phone, and the secret in it, burns a hole in Nick’s pocket and in his brain for days. He books the appointment, tries to describe what he wants in the least disparaging terms he can manage. The woman on the other end of the line doesn’t even sound surprised.

He hangs up, and then panics and calls Hook.

“You can make people look like their passport photos, right?”

“Hello to you too,” Hook says. All the _you’re really weird, dude_ that the hairdresser might have been politely holding back is now coming full force down the line. Hook, at least, sounds like he’s laughing at him. “People don’t look like their own passport photos because…?”

“I’m going to … um.” Nick’s spent years hiding from sniffs, and trying to hide from watchers which had probably just boiled down to a list of superstitions, crossed fingers and hope. He’s never tried to keep a secret from one. Maybe it’s impossible. “Um. You’ll see?”

Hook is definitely laughing at him, Nick can _feel_ it.

“Yeah, bro, I can make people look like their passport photos. You go off and be all mysterious again.”

Nick exhales. “Thank you, seriously.”

“Go be weird, bro.”

~*~

The salon is down an alleyway, of all things. Nick steps into the place ahead of Cassie, and he’s pretty sure he’s made a mistake; there’s heavy bass music in the background, way too many lurid hairstyles, and more piercings and tattoos than he’s ever seen in one place before. Then he looks down at Cassie, and he’s sure he’s made a mistake: she’s looking around with glee, bug-eyed and like she’s died and gone to color heaven. On the plus side, it’s pretty apparent Cassie’s seen none of this.

“Wow,” Cassie breathes. She’s looking far too intently one of the customers, and the metal lizard that’s curving around her ear.

“No,” Nick says. “We’re here to do stuff to your _hair_. Hair grows back. Earrings…” he flounders.

“You can take earrings out,” she parries, promptly.

“Not the point,” Nick says. “Your mom will kill me if I bring you back to her disfigured.”

Something flickers over Cassie’s face, and Nick is half way to apologising when the woman strides over. She’s wearing a short-sleeved top, practically designed to show off the tattoos that curl around her biceps and down her forearms. Her hair is a shockingly bright pink.

“Munroe? 2pm? Cut and colour?”

Cover names take a beat to get used to. 

“That’s us,” Nick says. “Well, her.” He nudges Cassie forward. She goes forward way too willingly.

“This is how Hansel and Gretel get lead into the witch’s cottage, you know,” Nick points out.

They ignore him. “I’m Ursula,” the tattoo woman says.

“Julie,” Cassie says, like a pro. She boosts herself into the chair, and lets Ursula drape a cape around her shoulders. Ursula rubs the ends of Cassie’s curls, deftly.

“Been a few months since your last cut?”

Cassie affects a nonchalant shrug.

“My mom usually cuts it for me, but she’s been busy.”

 _Busy_ , Nick thinks. _Jesus._

“What are we doing today?”

Cassie jerks her thumb in Nick’s direction. “His idea, ask him. It’s my “surprise”.’ She makes the quote marks, and rolls her eyes, but Nick know her well enough, now, to recognise the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes, the weirdness for her of not actually knowing what was coming next. Nick finds himself hesitating.

“I can show you, if you want.”

She meets his eyes in the mirror, considers that. “I trust you,” she says, and it’s like another level cementing something put in place those nights ago in the hotel room.

He scrolls to the photo and passes it to Ursula. Her eyes light up.

“You like color, Julie?”

“Definitely,” Cassie says.

“Then let’s do this.”

They’re off – Ursula running her hands through Cassie’s hair, and they’re talking about layers and home dyes and the vagaries of curls.

Nick backs off, finds a chair out of the way, angles it so he can see the entrance and can see Cassie in the mirror. Instinct.

He puts down her shoulder bag, and it hits the floor and spills onto its back, the flap falling open and pens and clutter spilling everywhere. He gathers them in handfuls, and her notebook is right there, peeking out of the bag. He picks it up. The cover is wild spirals and curls: red, blue, purple, orange vines, dense doodles. He stares at it, hypnotised, and glances over at her.

Ursula has Cassie’s hair in clips, and is slathering on goop, and laying foil. Cassie meets his eyes in the mirror, and sees what he’s holding. She holds his gaze steadily, and she shrugs one shoulder, and gives him a tiny smile. _If you want._

Wanting is nowhere near should, and he hesitates still, but it only lasts a moment.

Nick opens Cassie’s journal.

The first page is a flat representation of a bento box, or it would be if it had chopsticks instead of a silver knife and fork. _Plastic cutlery. Airplane meal_ , he realises, and turns the page. A chandelier, and a red scribble of carpet at the bottom of the page. Nick guesses they could afford – financially and safety wise – to stay in some pretty impressive digs.

It takes Nick a moment to realise the next page is an attempt at perspective – long silver rectangles meeting at a vanishing point with stick figures dotted along them, viewed from behind. One has yellow curls, the other is taller, with long yellow lines of hair. He’s mildly surprised that a swanky hotel would go for something as bland as white walls.

Then he sees the hotel room on the next page, blocks of colour – bed, wall artwork, skyline view, -- and back to white corridors. A street scene of a crowd, colourful shop signs, then white walls again. Division corridors, Nick realises with a sickening lurch as he pages through the book. Cassie had been seeing her and her mom captured by Division, over and over again.

 _”I like color,”_ she’d said.

“I bet you do,” Nick breathes. “God.”

He keeps flipping through; Cassie’s mom alone in Division, and then the tiger starts appearing, scattered between sketches of motel signs and… the location of small-winning slot machines. Smart kid. The tiger, over and over, more detailed and recognisable as the pages progress. _Practice makes perfect_ Nick thinks grimly. And then he hits his toothbrush, and their six million dollars, which turned out to be close enough to reality.

 _We all die_. It’s confronting, still, the sketches of vaguely-passing-resemblance-him with the crosses for eyes. Hook outside the elevator, crosses again but definitely dead if only going by the sheer amount of red scribbled blood around him. Emily dead, Pinky dead, Cassie dead under the tiger, and Nick dead, all the way up to the yellow grid of the scaffolding, and a broken-looking sketch-him hanging in it. Christ. That was a lot of dodging they’d done.

Then after all that grim, the jagged triangles of color, like teeth but sketched over the entire page. He doesn’t know what to make of those. He’s not sure Cassie knows what to make of them either. 

He turns the page, expecting blank blackness, but there’s a monochrome silver sketch there, done light and fast, somewhere between fleeting and uncertain. Not white corridors this time, a face with long straight hair, a café table, and – he’s seen enough to recognise Cassie’s attempts at cutlery – a plate with a fork next to it, and on the plate, what might be a slice of cake.

Cassie isn’t in the picture, neither is he. There’s nothing to indicate it’s happening in August. It might even be Kira tucking into a piece of quiche sometime tomorrow. But Nick really doesn’t think so. _Talking about the future can change it_ Cassie had said, and here was a future so badly wanted that it might just be a wish. He closes Cassie’s notebook silently, reverently, and tucks it back into her bag.

When Nick looks up, they’ve moved over to the sinks; Ursula is rinsing Cassie’s hair, and they’re talking a mile a minute. 

“Wait, wait,” Ursula’s saying as Cassie sits up. “If it’s a surprise, I’m going to dry you here, before you see yourself in the mirror.” She winks at Nick and gets to work. 

The long wet lengths of Cassie’s hair dry into a multicolored tumble of ringlets: red, orange, green, blue, pink. Nick is terribly afraid, suddenly, that it’s too much, but it’s done now. He starts to brace himself.

“Wait, again,” Ursula says. Nick nearly groans aloud. She’s studying Cassie’s hair intently. “I know your picture had it in a ponytail, but I don’t think that’s how you show off color like this.” She takes chunks of Cassie’s hair, and starts braiding, deftly.

“ _Oh_ ,” Nick says, staring. He grabs for Cassie’s book, starts flipping pages. Cassie closes her eyes theatrically as Ursula leads her back to the mirrors.

Cassie opens her eyes and _shrieks_. For a moment, Nick has no idea what that means, and then Cassie is hurling herself at him, whooping and laughing. “Oh my god, oh my god, I love it.”

“I’m glad,” Nick says, really feeling the relief. He takes half a step back, gets her sketchbook between the two of them. She stares at jagged triangles, and the bright shapes of her braid. “I think I’ll buy you some art classes for your birthday,” Nick says, as seriously as he can manage. “That doesn’t look like your hair at all.” Cassie yelps again, this time indignantly, and whacks him with her sketchbook. She turns in front of the mirror, and her glee is infectious.

“Some days I particularly love my job,” Ursula grins at him.

“Clown vomit,” Nick mouths back, but hands his credit card over unhesitatingly. Ursula cackles all the way to the cash register.


End file.
